Open Solaris 2008.11 - A step in the right direction, but the journey is long

Updated: March 18, 2009

My review of Open Solaris 2008.05 was a rant of a dissatisfied Linux
user, who found the fresh new Open Solaris desktop edition to be too messy and difficult for daily usage. After
cooling my head for a few months, I decided to try the latest release, Open Solaris 2008.11 and see if some of
the issues have been solved. Open Solaris 2008.11 has been on the market for approx. four months and a short
re-review is in order.

Is Open Solaris 2008.11 any better than its predecessor?

Live CD experience

I decided to pop the CD into my T42 machine and boot, to see whether Open Solaris can handle the four-year old
hardware. 2008.05 had issues with some of the drivers when tested in a virtual machine, most notably the sound
driver. While not truly indicative of a real life situation, it did indicate of a possible limited hardware
compatibility. The only way to check whether Solaris can match comparable, modern Linux distros with extensive
hardware support was to test-drive it on a real machine.

Changes are a-comin'

Bob Dylan has a fabulous song The Times Are a-Changin' - and so seems that Solaris is a-changin', too. The GRUB
menu has changed and sports paler, more reasonable shades of blue.

Open Solaris is aesthetically pleasing, sporting a well made Gnome desktop, but then, this is not truly a
Solaris feature. Nevertheless, the first impression is of a well made product, although underneath the hood, it
behaves differently from any Linux you know.

Wireless

One of the first thing I wanted to check was wireless. Open Solaris booted in approx. three minutes and
informed me that it has connected to a default wireless network. Not bad, but the specific unpassworded router
did not belong to me, so I changed that.

When I clicked on one of my two networks, I was asked to provide a password:

I did and the icon turned green, indicating I was successfully connected. However, when I opened Firefox, there
was no connection to the Internet. Looking under Firefox preferences, I've noticed that Open Solaris 2008.11
ships with Use system proxy settings under Advanced >
Network > Settings configured as default, but even when I changed this to direct connection, .i.e.
No proxy, the situation did not improve.

Burrowing more deeply into the menus, I discovered that 2008.11 only supports WEP, it seems, which is a shame.

Eventually, I resorted to connecting to the default, unencrypted network. However, even this did not help. Open
Solaris acquired no address from the router and the Internet was nil. This might be a classic newbie mistake,
but I don't think so. Either way, following the same steps I normally do with Linux distros, Open Solaris
refused to go live.

This really limited my live CD escapades. I had intended to go online and connect to my other computers, to see
whether I could play a collection of various audio and video files, but I was forced to postpone these checks
until the installation in a virtual machine.

Mounting of drives

2008.11 had no issues detecting and mounting a 2GB FAT32 USB drive. I managed to save a few screenshots to the
device without any issues. However, when I tried to unmount it, the operating system complained:

Open Solaris definitely has issues with hardware. We've seen the sound problem in 2008.05 (and we'll check it
again later); there was the Wireless issue above - and now this. Furthermore, the little USB drive is labeled
(called MojoPac), but 2008.11 does not seem to be able to read the label. I wonder if plugging in an NTFS
device would have worked. In general, I assume not, as 2008.05 had no issues connecting to Windows Samba
shares.

With this check, I ended the live CD test. Or tried to ... Like its predecessor, 2008.11 does not have a reboot
button available in the live CD session. You can only logout. If you press Ctrl + Alt + Del, you will still
remain at the login screen, but the GUI will turn off, leaving you at the console.

I realize that rebooting a machine running a live CD session is no big deal, but the graceful option of
termination the session and ejecting the CD would have been very nice. We'll talk more about the infamous
reboot button later.

Installation

This time, the installation was uneventful. I have not encountered any of the partitioning problems I had with
2008.05. I dedicated 768MB of RAM to Solaris, and this seems to infuse it with a fresh breath of liveliness
that was not there the last time, albeit with only 512MB.

Compared to various Linux distros, Open Solaris is a voracious memory beast. Recommendations are multi-GB, the
more the better, to allow the new Solaris ZFS to work its miracles. However, even with 768MB, the performance
was noticeably better than the last time, probably indicating that 512MB, a decent figure for any Linux, is a
bit too little for Solaris.

Desktop usage, no spasms this time

Open Solaris 2008.11 was much more polite. It was far from a typical Linux distro, but it did show signs of
progress and improvement, which is the most important thing. Someone out there is listening and making the
right choices in creating a better product.

Device Driver Utility

The first thing I did was check whether the new edition supported my basic sound driver. The answer is still
no. And while 2008.05 would let me would-be update the driver, without actually doing anything, 2008.11 simply
provides no solution. It informs me that there are no drivers available and ends the sad chapter there, but
does not infuse me with false hope like the predecessor.

The lack of support for such a basic device (ES1371) is a shame, though.

Sharing

I tried a few new tricks this time. First was to use the Shared folder feature, available via System in the
menu. This turns out to be a purely UNIX thing, supporting only NFS, no Samba.

Samba did not work this time! When I tried to browse the neighborhood, no Windows networks were found. This
effectively prevented me from grabbing my test kit of audio and video files with which I always test
the multimedia capabilities of different operating systems. We'll talk more about multimedia a little later.

Proxy issues

For a strange reason, 2008.11 does not like proxies. Additionally, changing between different options - from no
proxy to proxy and vice versa - requires a reboot. Logging in and out of a session did not seem to help. BTW, I
might be missing something obvious here, as I'm no Solaris expert. I'm just following my experience with Linux
where such solutions worked.

Speaking of reboot ...

This time, there's a button. 2008.05 did not have one.

Updates

The software update utility worked well. I even found MP3 codecs in the repository and installed them.

Multimedia

Knowing whether my multimedia was fully supported was not possible in the virtual machine, because I had no
sound. Flash did not work though. I visited Youtube and was promptly informed that there was no Flash Player
installed. I then went to the Adobe site and was glad to find a Solaris package available.

This was a tar archive, which I extracted. However, unlike Linux, there
was no installation script, only the flash driver (libflash.so). I copied it manually to Firefox directory,
under plugins, but this did not give me any Flash playability on Youtube.

I could not test MP3 playback. One, I could not get my files; they resides on the network and Samba was giving
me a gip. Two, even if files were there, there would have been no sound. But I will err on the positive side
and believe that music would have worked, as the repository did contain the MP3 codecs package.

ZFS filesystem

This is something I wanted to test the last time, but gave up on trying eventually, losing my temper over many
other, more trivial matters. Now that the experience was so much more reasonable, I decided to what ZFS really
means - to an unknowing Solaris user, like me.

There was a lot of hype in the press. The filesystem truly seems like a marvelous creation. I have no doubt
that Solaris experts will be able to happily utilize its powers day and night. But can a newbie do anything
meaningful, fun and safe with it?

In order to test the functionality of ZFS, I decided not to use the command line at all. The goal was to see
whether ZFS had any merits for a normal user.

Reading online a little, I learned that ZFS can save snapshots, preserving the system state, including files
and folders, over time. This is similar to what TimeVault does, so I figured this could be a great way of
creating unattended data backup archives.

This functionality is called Time Slider.

Under Advanced Options, you can choose which mount points / file systems to backup.

Looking into the home directory, we can see the ZFS snapshots in action:

And also system-wise:

As to TimeVault, we will talk about it separately.

Java

Since Sun Java is a de-facto Java environment worldwide, you won't have any problems running Java on Open
Solaris. In fact, Open Solaris 10 used to run a complete Java desktop.

Nvidia

2008.11 also comes with an Nvidia X Server Settings utility. There's no support for other cards yet.

Other things

There were no other special issues, either good or bad. Solaris was quite usable, as long as I did not demand
extras, in which case trying to debug things proved a bit of a problem. Google searches were lean, with little
instant-help information. If you're thorough and thoroughly patient, then you may find what you need, but if
you're used to Ubuntu-style searches, you won't like it.

Conclusion

Open Solaris 2008.11 has a lot to go. It's better than 2008.05 and this is an important, encouraging step.
However, it still cannot compare with the popular Linux distros, like openSUSE, Ubuntu or others. Major
problems seem to be a rather deep gap between beginner's despair and comfortable knowledge, lack of online
sources to assist you in your quest and a certain rigidity toward daily stuff that people want, like
multimedia, interactivity and good support for all sorts of peripherals and gadgets. It may be the Solaris
marketing model, it may be me and my Linux-heavy habits, but I did not find 2008.11 to be ready for the average
user, even an average Linux user, at that.

For now, Open Solaris seems like an interesting hobby, at least to me. I would still not consider it as my
primary or even a secondary desktop operating system.

Following the progress in future releases will definitely be a great adventure.